Google

Calico

Extending life by extending health

California Life Company is the Google-backed life extension company that wants to fight back against the diseases most associated with aging. In tribute to the idea of long life, our identity system is inspired by some of the longest-living organisms on the planet.

Story

Google wants to extend human life. Wait, what?! Ok, so if you’re like us, your first thoughts tend to drift toward sci-fi scenarios, the elixir of life, or the idea of immortality. But extending life doesn’t actually mean allowing people to live forever, but rather about extending the number of healthy years we all have on this planet.
Calico - short for California Life Company - is tackling one of life’s great mysteries: aging. They want to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan and use the knowledge to help people lead longer and healthier lives. While it’s not realistic to slow down time, Calico researchers and scientists believes it’s possible to slow down the cellular aging process.

In nature, trees are some of the oldest living organisms, and their life stages are visualized and measured by their ring patterns. Human lives also pass through stages - we grow and evolve from children into adults, and move into senior years. This idea of stages, circles, and rings helped form the core concept of our identity system.
The brandmark is built up with a series of rings that actually represent a hidden alphabet, spelling out the letters “C”, “G”, “A”, “T”. These letters refer to the base pairs within human DNA, the building blocks of life.